I am a writer, professor, and scholar whose work explores points of friction in the globalization of literary cultures. My work is grounded in the study of modern African literatures with a particular focus on Senegal. I was trained in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley (French, Wolof, English). I am currently Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis, where I also serve as Director of Critical Theory.

My research and teaching focus on African literature, world literature, print culture, translation and media theory, film, and comics. My writing and translations have appeared widely in such venues as PMLA, Small Axe, Yale French Studies, Research in African Literatures, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Two Lines, Etudes Littéraires Africaines, and the Times Literary Supplement. My work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Hellman Family Foundation, and the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.

My first book explored the language question in literature from Senegal. The Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal (Fordham, 2019) won first book awards from the African Literature Association and the American Comparative Literature Association. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both Wolof and French, the book traced the emergence of a politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development. 

My two current research projects explore the global circuits and uneven archives of African literatures.

In 2022, I uncovered a forgotten poem by the Senegalese novelist Mariama Bâ, author of the foundational feminist novel So Long a Letter. Bâ’s lost poem records her experiences at the 1977 Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), held in Lagos, Nigeria. For the past several years I have been working to translate and promote this text as well as Bâ’s other unknown early writings. My translation and introduction appeared in PMLA in October 2023 as “FESTAC… Memories of Lagos.” I edited a cluster of essays around this poem that also appeared in PMLA in October 2024.

I am at work on a new project that explores one of the most widespread yet understudied narratives in the world. This is a tale of desire, deception, and escape that was told all over pre-colonial Africa and spread across the globe by slavery and imperialism. The story tells of a defiant young woman who refuses all suitors only to fall in love with a handsome stranger. But when that stranger turns out to be a malevolent creature in disguise who has assembled a human body for himself out of rented parts, the young woman must find a way to escape. By exploring the connections between some of the many people who collected, adapted, or responded to this story over the last two centuries – including some of the most influential creative writers, philosophers, editors, and anthropologists of their day – my project aims to bring into view a narrative constellation stretching across Africa and its diasporas. The project has two outcomes: a book exploring the forms of aesthetic and political imagination that have emerged around this tale; and a companion website featuring visualizations of global patterns in its circulation. This research has received generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the DataLab and Deans of Letters and Sciences of UC Davis. The first excerpt from this project recently appeared in a volume of the African Literature in Transition series from Cambridge University Press, edited by Karin Barber and Stephanie Newell.